Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  For some, Franklin’s involvement in such activities was confusing. His defense of nonviolence as a tactic and of integration as a goal were well known, as were the sharp-edged comments Cleage and the Henry brothers delivered about him in public. Within New Bethel, where nationalist sentiment was not popular, few if any found Cleage’s amalgamation of nationalism and Christianity attractive. Yet Milton Henry thought he understood Franklin’s motivation. Decades later, Henry suggested that Franklin “was a lover of his people too.” The freedom struggle ultimately demanded that individuals transcend personal differences to work together whenever possible.62

  Also true was that Franklin himself had more complex attitudes than he necessarily revealed in every public debate. He loved Martin Luther King and supported his friend’s program without question. Like King, however, Franklin possessed a layered understanding of that plastic term integration. For Franklin, his friend and proud pupil Jasper Williams understood, integration meant “that every man ought to have the right to be treated like all men. But in terms of him just loving to be in the white world,” he remarked, “he never came across to any of us as that being his desire.” Black church culture, for example, would—and should—remain black.63

  C. L.’s commitment to nonviolence was similarly complicated. He did nothing in public to challenge King and thought that notions of armed revolutionaries attacking white American institutions were worse than an infantile fantasy—they were suicidal. Yet his commitment was not philosophical, and his specific Mississippi experience led him to doubt nonviolence’s universal transformative power. Franklin carried a pistol at times, and he never joined confrontational, nonviolent civil rights demonstrations in either Detroit or the South but once, and then at King’s specific request. For Franklin, integration was not a political metaphor for the elimination of a strong black cultural identity, any more than tactical nonviolence required that he relinquish his proclaimed American right to bear arms in self-defense.64

  Following his appearance at the Black Arts Convention early in July, Franklin left for a European vacation, his congregation’s anniversary offering temporarily quelling concerns about his tax liabilities. He returned a few weeks later, just before the most destructive domestic upheaval in American history transformed Detroit into a war zone.

  It began on Twelfth and Clairmont, just a few blocks from New Bethel, early on Sunday morning, July 23, when police raided a “blind pig,” or after-hours club. By that afternoon, the fury that had accumulated over so many years—spurred by police violence, random murders of unarmed black residents, high unemployment, deteriorated housing—broke the last restraining barrier. By Sunday afternoon, crowds controlled many of the streets in the riot area and physically threatened John Conyers when he tried to calm them. Looting and burning began, and local and state police, the National Guard, and then federal troops occupied the city. Both blacks and whites engaged in armed assaults. In the intense roaming battles that lasted until Thursday, July 27, more than 7,200 were arrested and 27 charged with sniping (although most of these charges would be dismissed); 43 were killed—thirty-three black, ten white. Approximately $40 million in damage rained down on buildings, homes, and other property. It was a horrific experience. Recalling, with poetic license, his formative years in Detroit, the hard tone of John Lee Hooker’s voice strained to grasp the enormity of what had happened: “My hometown is burning to the ground / worster than Vietnam.” Large sections of black Detroit lay in ruins, block after block of fire-gutted buildings with exterior walls yet standing, supporting invisible floors and roofs. The firebombing of Dresden during World War II became the immediate journalistic metaphor. Decades later, in the neighborhoods to the east and to the west of Woodward, that image remained.65

  As was true for every other pastor, politician, and celebrity in Detroit that week, C. L. Franklin could, with Hooker, only cry. Those in the streets responded only to superior force, and the armed troops enforcing martial law discouraged community peacemakers from even trying. The weight of that week in July 1967 bore down heavily on the city for the remainder of C. L.’s life, and beyond. It was not, however, the only tragedy that would befall Franklin in the coming decade.66

  CHAPTER TEN

  NOW HE IS DOWN

  In the months after the July 1967 riot, a violence-laden rhetoric increasingly dominated Detroit’s political climate. Business and trade-union leaders, in alliance as before with the traditional black civil rights organizations, sought to direct Detroit’s post-1967 recovery through New Detroit, Inc., which had at its disposal significant private and public funding to revive the economy and repair the city’s neighborhoods. But militants of various tendencies could no longer be excluded from such organizations. Shaken elites, white and black, hoped their inclusion might protect the city from the fury that no one, in fact, controlled. Some activists found seats on New Detroit’s board. Others, such as the small League of Revolutionary Workers, a Marxist-influenced organization of black workers within the UAW, remained outside. Not surprisingly, Albert Cleage managed to do both. Now a weekly columnist for the Chronicle, Cleage created the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee to vie with New Detroit to determine policy and obtain public funds. Together with Karl Gregory, an economics professor at Wayne State, and Milton Henry, Cleage created a People’s Tribunal in August 1967, to try the policemen accused of murdering three black men at the Algiers Hotel during the riot. The grand jury’s actions in releasing one officer and holding the other on reduced charges had incensed the three organizers. They expected the tribunal would turn equally angry observers into committed activists. Some close to Cleage went further. James and Grace Boggs argued that the violence of July 1967 created “the intense emotional unity that is necessary to a national movement.” Terming the events of July a rebellion and not a riot, they foresaw a black revolutionary movement rising from Detroit’s ashes, the forerunner of a new nation.1

  At times that “emotional unity” seemed in scarce supply during the winter and spring of 1968. Milton Henry’s call for all blacks to declare February 21, the third anniversary of Malcolm X’s death, a national holiday met with little response even from Detroit’s schoolchildren. Undaunted, Henry convened a convention in March at Cleage’s church to create an independent black nation. (Although he lent his church, Cleage himself rejected the idea of a separate national territory, as did James and Grace Boggs.) On Saturday, March 30, at Cleage’s Shrine of the Black Madonna, two hundred delegates from several states willed the new nation into existence. They called it the Republic of New Africa and pledged their “total devotion” to work “for the fruition of black power, for the fruition of black nationhood.” In their Declaration of Independence, they declared themselves “forever free and independent of the jurisdiction of the United States of America.” In this “revolution against oppression,” they presented the new nation’s goals: to achieve freedom for black people in America, to support world revolution, and to “build a New Society that is better than what we now know and as perfect as man can make it.” The convention elected Robert F. Williams, whom the Henrys continued to promote as the American revolutionary leader although in exile in the People’s Republic of China, president; Milton Henry, who now often responded to the name Brother Gaidi Obadele, first vice-president; Betty Shabbazz, Malcolm X’s widow, second vice-president; and Brother Imari Obadele, formerly Richard Henry, Minister of Information.2

  At the heart of the founders’ revolutionary faith was a self-grandeur that edged toward the delusional. Two weeks before the convention, Milton Henry wrote Mao Tse-tung, leader of the Chinese Communist government, announcing the coming meeting because “our lack of land and sovereignty and the racism of the United States make it appear impossible for you to attend or to send a representative to be with us.” Henry’s presumption, recalling his earlier approach to Fidel Castro, must have left the Chinese revolutionary baffled.3

  On Wednesday, March 27, 1968, C. L. Franklin arrived in Memphis. King a
nd the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, stretched to their very limits, were orchestrating two major campaigns simultaneously. The previous December, SCLC had announced plans for the Poor People’s Campaign, a national effort to focus attention on issues of poverty and economic injustice for all Americans. Three months later, without a national staff or the local leadership essential for that grassroots campaign in place, King found it impossible to refuse the call for help from Memphis’s all-black sanitation workers union. They had been on strike since February 13, and their condition was dire. In their racially segregated city job, wages and working conditions were abysmal, and Mayor Henry Loeb adamantly refused to recognize their union. As he had in other crises, King asked for help. To his relief, Franklin was one of many who responded. King knew that Franklin’s skills and reputation as a preacher familiar with street life and the forgotten could be effective with Memphis’s angry, often unchurched young blacks, who did not easily warm to nonviolence as a tactic.4

  Franklin arrived very late that evening and did not attend the march on Thursday morning, in keeping with his long practice of limiting his exposure, whenever possible, to white southern anger and violence. He left word for his friend that he would be ready to speak that evening, as planned. But that was too late. Young black Memphians, some affiliated with local gangs, looted stores along the line of march, and the police responded fiercely and indiscriminately. SCLC cancelled the rally, Franklin returned to Detroit, and a shaken King left for Atlanta.5

  Increasingly worried about the impact of violence on the movement, King committed himself to march again on April 5 but included in the preparations leaders of the Invaders, a prominent local black gang. King and his staff arrived on the third for strategy meetings. As always when he arrived in Memphis, a white limousine and driver were placed at his disposal, courtesy of the R. S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home—the same family who had sponsored C. L.’s Memphis radio program a quarter of a century earlier.

  After a series of meetings into the early evening, one at which the Invaders agreed to act as marshals at the Friday march, King asked his close friend and assistant, Ralph D. Abernathy, to speak at a pre-march rally that night. Tired and overwhelmed with unfinished tasks, King intended to work on the massive demonstration the Poor People’s Campaign scheduled for May in the nation’s capital. When Abernathy, Billy Kyles, and others arrived at the church, however, they understood immediately that the crowd, smaller than normal due to a fierce storm due that evening, expected King, as did the bank of national television and radio reporters arrayed about the sanctuary. Abernathy called King at the room they shared at the Lorraine Motel, a black-owed facility at 406 Mulberry Street, five blocks south of Beale, the Memphis oasis for black artists on both the gospel and the R&B tours. King came immediately and waited pensively as Abernathy gave an uncharacteristically long biographical introduction.6

  A tired, subdued King took the pulpit on the evening of what was the fifty-second day of the strike. He joked about his friend’s excessive words, welcomed the audience, and then entered into a long explanation of why, of all the eras of history, he was most happy to be alive at this moment. At this time, he felt, the central moral and political issues that had troubled humanity since Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt had come to a crisis so severe that survival itself was at stake. The Memphis struggle for justice was part of that larger “human rights revolution.” As his voice gathered force, he reminded his people of the 1963 Birmingham campaign. There, too, the opposition was fierce, and Bull Connor’s fire hoses reflected “a kind of physics,” the force of which Connor fully expected would sweep the demonstrators from the street as just so much debris. But King proclaimed amid cries from the audience, Connor’s “physics . . . somehow didn’t relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out.” So, too, would it be in Memphis, where it was necessary to embrace “a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” to place the needs of the sanitation men and the cause of justice above personal self-interest.

  Shifting focus, King turned to the topic of death, his own death. He reminded the audience of when, a decade before, he had been stabbed by a deranged woman in New York City. So close was the tip of the blade to his aorta that had he sneezed, he would have died. But he did not sneeze—a sign, listeners might infer, of his divinely appointed role—and he since had participated in the efforts of the civil rights movement to resuscitate American democracy. But new threats now loomed. Only that morning, the plane bringing him to Memphis had been delayed by bomb threats, and the question was asked: “What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?” King acknowledged that he did not know what was ahead, although he knew it would be difficult. “But that doesn’t matter with me now.” Like Moses just before his death, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” The prospect of a long life pleased him, he confessed, but his main charge was “to do God’s will,” to hold faith with the God who had brought him higher: “And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”7

  None of his staff had ever heard him speak so intimately in public about his confrontation with death. “We were all awed and shaken by Martin’s speech,” Andrew Young recalled. “But Martin seemed buoyed by inspiration.”8

  The next day, April 4, King and his staff had a series of meetings. A harried King looked forward to a soul-food dinner at Billy Kyles’s house, prepared by Kyles’s wife, Gwen, and a group of women from his Monumental Baptist Church. Kyles arrived at room 306 in the Lorraine Motel about five. King, Abernathy, and Kyles talked and joked as Kyles hurried them along. Abernathy picked out a shirt and Kyles a tie for King to wear. About quarter to six, as Abernathy returned to the bathroom to apply aftershave, Kyles, and then King, walked out onto the little balcony off the room. In the courtyard below, SCLC staff members Andrew Young, James Bevel, Jesse Jackson, the musician Ben Branch, and limousine driver Solomon Jones, among others, milled about. King leaned over the railing, teased Jackson about not having the proper attire for dinner, and asked Branch, whose trumpet rendition of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” had delighted him at an earlier mass meeting, to play it that night. As Jones called up to remind King to bring a coat, because it would be cool that evening, Kyles took a few steps away from King, toward the door to the room. At that moment, a shot rang out. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to the balcony floor, one foot thrust through the railing, a gaping wound to his head. He would die within the hour.9

  As with so many others across the nation and the world, it took C. L. Franklin “quite a while before I got over the experience.” Like other close friends, C. L. had been warned by King. Recalled Franklin, “He sat right in my basement, one Sunday night,” after he had spoken at New Bethel, “and he said, ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘I will never live to see 40.’ He said, ‘Some of our white brothers are very, very sick, and they are dangerous. I’ll never see 40.’ And he was 39 when he was killed.” Franklin had lost a dear friend as well as a leader whom he profoundly admired. The depth of C. L.’s grief remained private; his saddened public comments struck the correct, official tone. But he probably knew, as many worried, that more had died than just one man.10

  King’s assassination that April only reinforced the Republic of New Africa’s convictions. A month later, Brother Imari arrived in Washington to deliver a formal diplomatic note to the “representatives” (actually two security guards) of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The communiqué officially requested the start of negotiations between the two nations and demanded that the U.S. government cede five southern states and pay $200 million in compensation for the expropriation of black labor during and after slavery. By June, citing the absence of an American response as a provocation, the Republic ann
ounced the formation of the Black Legion, “a black army to fight for black rights.” In its nationalist rhetoric, militant posturing, and infatuation with armed struggle, if not in its diplomatic approach, the Republic reflected a growing tone in public political debate.11

  Cecil Franklin found these attitudes simply wrong, perhaps even suicidal. Twenty-eight in 1968, the Morehouse graduate and Air Force veteran was now married and an ordained minister who served as an assistant pastor at his father’s church. He also chaired the Detroit branch of the Poor People’s Campaign. In a wide-ranging interview in the Chronicle that February, he scoffed at the embrace of violence currently fashionable: “Do you think 190 million whites will allow 45 million, at most, blacks to burn down their country? We’re heading for genocide.” “Just set up a picket line,” he advised, when confronted by a businessman’s refusal to integrate. “You don’t have to burn them out, they’re not going to stay unless they’re making a profit.”12

  On Monday, May 13, the Midwest contingent of the campaign, approximately six hundred strong, arrived in Detroit for a rally. Some four thousand local supporters marched down Woodward to Cobo Hall, many wearing the “uniform” of the campaign, denim jackets and bib overalls. That evening, the police and demonstrators argued over an illegally parked sound car. Something was thrown, and the police responded with force: mounted officers wielding batons rained down blows on unarmed people. The Franklins, father and son, quickly shifted the remaining crowd toward New Bethel, where Claud Young and church nurses provided medical services, and cots and blankets were set up. C. L. criticized the police in a press conference, and Ralph Abernathy arrived to demand a full investigation. The police violence was part of a larger national pattern intended, he argued, to discourage marchers. A few days later, with no resolution in sight, the Midwest contingent that now included Detroit’s group continued its march to Washington.13